


Something Borrowed, Something Blue

by battybatzgirl



Category: Next to Normal - Kitt/Yorkey
Genre: F/M, Family Feels, Gen, Henry Feels, and natalie just wants to dance, awesome bigbro!Gabe, but he's still dead, in which Gabe is a secret fashion diva
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-07
Updated: 2013-05-07
Packaged: 2017-12-10 15:34:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/787635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/battybatzgirl/pseuds/battybatzgirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the night of the spring formal, Natalie can't seem to find anything to wear.  Gabe helps with that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Something Borrowed, Something Blue

**Author's Note:**

> I cannot seem to get over this musical. It's rare that I write two things for one fandom within this short amount of time. It's also rare that I actually finish things and get to post them.   
> Wow.   
> Okay.   
> So, um, in this, Gabe is still dead (obviously) and is being that awesome and dorky big brother that I know he would totally be if he wasn't so busy being DEAD. (Still not over it.) Takes place during the musical on the night of the spring formal.

Dance, Natalie thinks. Dance, dance, dance. 

“What the fuck am I supposed to wear to a dance?” she voices aloud in confusion. She stares into her closet with frustration, making small huffing noises as she goes through her clothes.

(“Well, for starters, don’t look like a trumpy know-it-all,” Gabe pipes up. He is lounging on her bed, perfectly at ease, watching her frantic actions in amusement. “Why do girls care so much about what they look like, anyway? Not everything is about you, you know. And trust me, I would know.”)

Maybe she can wear the dress she wore for her grandmother’s funeral. True, it’s black and kind of dull, but it has lace and made her look older. She fishes it out of her closet and holds it up in front of her body in the mirror.

(“Oh, god,” says Gabe, his face scrunched up in disgust. “Get rid of that thing. Better yet, burn it. Burn it and then dance on the ashes. It should never see the light of day.”)

The dress isn’t as pretty as she remembers. The lace is torn and the black washes her out. It makes her look even more like the skinny, pale, recovering-from-being-on-a-bender teenager that she is and she hates that. Natalie tosses it over her shoulder and goes back to digging in her closet. 

She finds another ensemble; this one more of a sundress instead of formal wear. And sunny it is. The thing is yellow—and not just like a soft yellow, but like a bright fucking neon yellow that would hurt someone’s eyes if they stared at it for too long. Ironically, it has little sunflowers embroidered on it. (As soon as she pulls it out of the closet, Gabe breaks out into hysterics.

“Oh my god!” he wails between laughter. “What the fuck is that thing?!”)

Natalie holds the dress at arms length, her nose scrunching up. Mom had bought this for her a while back, when they had first started to switch her medications. Natalie knew her mother and knew how to deal with little spurts of insanity like this—and it had to be a spurt of insanity, because really, who for the love of god would buy this freakish eyesore?!—so she decided to take the dress without protest and buried it away in her closet. She had actually forgotten about it until just now.

(“You should totally wear that,” Gabe says, his laughter gone but his smile still threatening to crack his face in half. “You sure will bring some light to that boy’s life! Make sure he takes you home with him; you can be his nightlight!” 

The boy cracks up, collapsing on the bed with laughter. As soon as he calms down, he sighs. “Dammit, what’s the point of me annoying you if you can’t even hear me being annoying?”)

Natalie sighs in frustration and tosses the hideous dress to the ground. She goes back through her closet and comes up with nothing else that is really fancy enough to wear to a spring formal. The brunette heavily again and covers her face with her hands.

It’s not like she actually wants to go to this stupid dance; it’s a stupid dance. But for some reason, it’s important to Henry, and whatever was important to Henry has suddenly become important to her. Natalie doesn’t really understand why this is, but all she knows is that if she doesn’t go to this stupid fucking dance, she’ll fuck up whatever was left of her and Henry’s relationship. 

And she doesn’t want that. She really doesn’t want that.

(“Maybe you should pull an ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ thing and go naked and just say that you’re wearing a dress?” Gabe suggests. “It’ll make him think he’s living in one of his wildest wet dreams.” He pauses, then shakes his head in disgust. “Oh, my god, ew. Eeeew. I just imagined my baby sister having sex, holy fuck, make it stop! Someone bleach my brain!”)

Natalie is almost to the point of giving up and asking her parents if she can go to Kohl’s or something because she needs a dress by tonight and she had nothing to wear and if she doesn’t find something to wear then she won’t go and if she doesn’t go then things with Henry will be over and she’ll add one more reason to why her life is so fucking pathetic—

Somewhere in that massive run-on thought she comes to a simple realization: Mom. Mom may be fucked up in the mind, but before all that happened she had a really nice sense of style. And true, it might seem stupid because everything she owns is from the 80s, but Natalie knows she has seen a few nice dresses peeking out from her mother’s closet. 

Satisfied with this new idea, Natalie steps over the dresses she had thrown on the ground and walks out of her room and across the hall into her parent’s. 

(Gabe follows at her heels. “Wow, you’re sinking to Mom’s level of style? You must be desperate.”)

Neither of her parents are home, which is a convince for the brunette. Had she have to deal with her mother’s wishy-washy-ness of her growing up—

Wait a second. She doesn’t give a flying fuck about Natalie.

“As if she ever did,” Natalie huffs to herself ruefully as she opens the door to her mother’s closet and steps inside. 

There are various hangers with different articles of clothing hanging from them, but she can’t seem to find a nice dress out of any of them. (Gabe stands behind her.  
“You’re looking in all the wrong places,” he tells her. “I’ve seen Mom go through here a thousand times—you’re not even close to where she keeps her dresses.”)

Natalie spends a little more time rifling through a collection of her mother’s blouses. (Gabe’s patience runs thin. He wraps his hand around her probing fingertips and guides them to the correct area of the closet.) 

Natalie doesn’t know how, but she suddenly finds herself looking through the area of her mother’s closet where she keeps her dresses. Mom isn’t exactly eccentric, but according to her father, apparently she used to be. In another life, her mother was a feisty young woman ready to take on the world. Now, she is a bleak and dull housewife who can’t tell up from down anymore. 

Still, Natalie has to admit that her mom had style when she was younger. The dresses vary from being something equivalent to wearing to a prom, a wedding…even a royal ball. Natalie briefly wonders where and when she wore all these dresses if her life was anything but extravagant.

Natalie has a lot of choices, but eventually she narrows herself down to two choices: a red pencil dress with a cut out back, or a light blue silky dress with no sleeves that barely reaches past her knees. She grabs one in each hand, takes them out of the closet and compares them in front of the mirror.

The red makes her look bold. Outgoing. More of a vixen then a sweet lover. The red dress made her look older, sophisticated, and gave the vibe that she was in charge. It was almost like the dress represented her new found wild personality. 

(“No.” Gabe stepped next to her in front of the mirror and frowned at his sister’s reflection. “No. No way. Absolutely not!” He threw up his arms. “Jesus, you’ll look like a hooker if you wear that! Red is a hooker color! You’re practically asking him to fuck you. Whatever happened to that ‘wait until marriage’ bullshit?”)

Natalie put down the red dress and held up the blue. The blue was…softer. Simpler. More modest.

(“Yes!”)

It matched her complexion quite nicely, and brought out her eyes along with her cheekbones. She looked…pretty.

(“Yes, yes,” Gabe encouraged excitedly. “That’s the one, wear that one!”)

It made her look like the lost and confused sixteen year old she really was. 

The last thing she wanted was that. Natalie threw the blue dress down and began to tug her clothes off to try on the red dress. 

(“No, no, don’t wear that!” groaned Gabe. “It’s showing way too much skin—what would Dad think? Well, who the fuck cares what Dad thinks anyway, so that’s not a very good argument. What would your boyfriend think of you dressing up as a hooker to his precious spring formal? He wouldn’t like it. Well, okay, he probably would like it, if you know what I mean, but that’s not the point I’m trying to make.”)

By this time, Natalie had stepped into the dress and was fitting her arms into the sleeves.

(“You aren’t listening to me!” her brother cried in frustration.) She put her hands behind her back to pull up the dress’s zipper. (“Goddamn it,” muttered Gabe, reaching for the zipper the same time Natalie did. “Do I have to do everything myself?” While she tried to pull up, he pulled down. As a result, the dress ripped and the zipper came off in Natalie’s hands.)

Natalie pulled her hand in front of her and looked at the zipper in shock. She had barely pulled the zipper up and it had simply broken off, just like that. The dress must have been older than she thought to have such a faulty zipper.

Natalie looked in the mirror at herself in the half-put on red dress—at what could have been the highlight of tonight’s memory. With the back of the dress torn and the zipper broken, there was no way she was wearing it now. 

She looked down at the blue dress. “I guess I’m stuck with you, then,” she told it sourly. 

(“Ha!” Gabe grinned in triumph. “I win!”)

Natalie shimmied out of the red dress and tossed it aside. She pulled the blue dress on over her head and straightened it on her body.   
It hugged her upper torso perfectly, defining curves and angles that needed to be defined and hiding other various imperfections. It fell loose around her hips, coming down to just short of her knees. Caught up in the moment, Natalie let her hair out of its regular pony tail and let it hang in waves down her back. 

“Wow,” she whispered.

(“Wow,” Gabe said.)

“Wow,” Henry breathed when he saw her. Natalie couldn’t help but smile and fought back the blush that was building up behind her cheeks. Henry pulled her to him and they began to dance. A slow song was currently playing, and as cheesy as it sounded, Natalie actually lost herself in the soft swaying motion their bodies were doing.

“You look beautiful,” Henry said softly in her ear. 

“I bet you say that to all the girls,” she retorted quietly back.

“No,” he denied, shaking his head and pressing their foreheads together. “No, no one else. Just you.”

“Promise?” she asked, barely more than a whisper, her breath ghosting across his lips. 

“Promise,” he confirmed, and he kissed her.


End file.
